Background

Centminmod.com domain uses AWS Route53 DNS as I need to make use of GeoDNS and Geo Latency based DNS to route visitors to the closest backend cluster that serves centminmod.com over 16+ active and 16+ backup servers located in London, Singapore, Tokyo, Los Angeles, Seattle, Dallas, New York/New Jersey, Sydney and Melbourne.

The forum domain community.centminmod.com uses Sucuri Cloudproxy for WAF and DDOS protection as they don't require moving my DNS located on AWS Route53 DNS so I can keep using Geo latency based DNS for centminmod.com.

Reasons For Moving

Cloudflare now has Load Balancing feature which they also termed as Traffic Manager Cloudflare Load Balancing | Cloudflare (Traffic Manager) which I have been privately testing since the original Traffic Manager announcement. I am so used to the term Traffic Manager rather than Loadbalancer for Cloudflare so will use the terms interchangeably.

Testing was via Cloudflare Traffic Manager API only configuration as there was no GUI dashboard to create load balancer, pools and origins for the setups. But now Cloudflare does have GUI dashboard it is now more enticing to move my entire Centminmod.com domain DNS over to Cloudflare. The Cloudflare Load Balancing/Traffic Manager is still rough around the edges and probably will be confusing for folks who didn't start out with Cloudflare Traffic Manager API first to understand how Loadbalancer Monitors, Pools (fallback, region (Enterprise only) and pop pools), Origins and Healthchecks all fit together.

Cloudflare Loadbalancer

Performance wise as you can expect with Cloudflare Loadbalancer and having multiple geographically located origin backend servers for centminmod.com main site means that visitors have a bit faster latency as your direct visitors to the closest origin backend server to them - what Cloudflare terms Geo-Steering. It's faster as Cloudflare's own edge POP datacenters may not always be the closest location point to your visitors - your original backend might be if you operate a geo cluster of backend servers.

Notice the connect and TTFB times on right are almost always faster - especially in locations where Cloudflare's datacenter isn't necessarily the closest to the visitor compared to my origin backend server i.e. Sao Paulo, Seattle, Toronto. These were old results so will have to retest as Cloudflare has added more datacenters to their mix since then.

Cloudflare Standard vs Cloudflare LoadBalancer

For most folks the basic difference for my above setup with Cloudflare Loadbalancer which Geo-Steer's visitors to the closest origin backend server from my geographic cluster is performance and uptime.

Standard Cloudflare looks to a single backend origin server = your real server to communicate with your server and pass on requests to and from visitors to your origin server. If your origin server is down, Cloudflare gives you that site down error message and/or serves a stale offline version of your site. For centminmod.com though it isn't an issue as I setup a flattened DNS record for centminmod.com origin so Cloudflare would currently be directed to my nearest geolocated origin backend as centminmod.com DNS is on AWS Route53 for Geo latency DNS.

Cloudflare Loadbalancer can be configured so if you have your site like my centminmod.com mirrored to geo cluster of servers located in London, Singapore, Tokyo, Los Angeles, Seattle, Dallas, New York/New Jersey, Sydney and Melbourne, then Cloudflare will communicate with the origin backend server closest to your visitor's geographic location. If your configure healthchecks on your pools/origins, then if my Sydney origin is down, Cloudflare Loadbalancer will direct the visitor to another origin within a pool or another pool within another region ensuring better uptime and failover.

Old diagram I made to help me understand Cloudflare's Traffic Manager/Loadbalancer Region choices you have available to configure for

And how it is laid out

You can have multiple Cloudflare loadbalancers too under same account as well as multiple pools within each load balancer and multiple origins within each pool (the load balancer part on the final origin backend destination).

Pricing

Now the only problem with moving from AWS Route53 DNS at ~US$25/month for GeoDNS/Geo Latency DNS to Cloudflare is that the forum domain needs DDOS protection, so would mean using Cloudflare Business plan at US$200/month. Which is actually more than the cost of my entire centminmod.com GeoDNS based cluster of servers ! But benefit is all my subdomains and main centminmod.com will be DDOS protected as well.

Pricing

Now the only problem with moving from AWS Route53 DNS at ~US$25/month for GeoDNS/Geo Latency DNS to Cloudflare is that the forum domain needs DDOS protection, so would mean using Cloudflare Business plan at US$200/month. Which is actually more than the cost of my entire centminmod.com GeoDNS based cluster of servers ! But benefit is all my subdomains and main centminmod.com will be DDOS protected as well.

I'd like to say it depends on potential and anticipated traffic growth for centmin mod as such a transition would take time to do and isn't just a flick of the switch to change Have to plan far ahead for centmin mod's continued operation and survival i.e. next 12 months, 24 months etc But right now it's a want more than a need

Yeah true.. centminmod.com recently spiked to 30,000 visitors/day and the geo cluster handled it all without breaking a sweat Probably could handle 10x times more in current state. It only takes me around 20-40 minutes in total to spin up a new server + load up all site data and configurations to add to the geo cluster right now to add more capacity at any web host in any datacenter that I currently use

Looks like Cloudflare Load Balancer is billable too Billing for Load Balancing so will end up more costly than my current AWS Route53 GeoDNS setup most likely !

How much does Load Balancing cost?

Load Balancing subscriptions begin at $5 - $50 per month, based on your selected subscription options. The number of origins, health check frequency, the number of regions checked from and geo-routing can be configured to fit your specific requirements. The $5 subscription allows you to configure 2 origins, 60 second health checks and checks from two (2) regions: ideal for straightforward load balancing or failover.

In addition to the monthly subscription, we will count the number of DNS requests ("queries") for each configured Load Balancer, per month. The first 500,000 queries, shared across all Load Balancers in your account, are free: additional usage beyond this is charged at 50 cents per 500,000 queries, rounded up to the next 500k queries.

Example:

81,451 DNS queries = subscription + $0 in usage.

511,881 DNS queries = subscription + $0.50 in usage

2,994,155 DNS queries = subscription + $2.50 in usage

Note that the first 500,000 queries are based on all active Load Balancers in your account, not per site (domain), as Load Balancers can be easily shared across sites by configuring a CNAME record.

What counts as 'usage' for Load Balacing?

Usage is counted as authoritative DNS queries against Cloudflare's name servers for each of the Load Balanced hostnames you have configured.

Many of you also had (or have!) questions about pricing—here's the short version:

It will be available to all of our self-serve plans (from Free through Business)
The base price starts at $5/month plus usage (measured in DNS queries per month), and allows you to configure 2 servers and health check every 60 seconds from one region.
The first 500k DNS queries per month (across all of your domains) is included: usage above that will be billed at 50c per 500k DNS queries.
If you need faster health checks (and failover), to configure more than 2 origin servers, or geographically route traffic to multiple locations, you can quickly configure these, with an additional cost per option, up to $60/month in total. The options include:

Number of origin servers: you can configure up to 6 origin servers, and we'll handle failover & health checking for these, automatically. 4 origins are +$10 over the base price and 6 origins are +$15.
Health check interval: start at 60 seconds, and you can opt-in to 30 second (+$10) or 15 second intervals (+$15) to improve failover response times.
Health check regions: We'll health check from 1 geographic region, and you can add additional health check regions for improved failover granularity - e.g. if we detect a failure routing to your origin servers in Europe, North America or Oceania don't have to follow suit unless they also detect problems. 4 regions (+$10) and 8 regions (+$15).
Geo-routing: Opt-in to geo-routing if you need to keep route users based on their geographic location for performance. This is a flat +$10/month regardless of how many regions you configure.
As an example: if you need geo-routing but only have 4 servers, you'll pay $5 (base) + $10 (4 origins) + $10 (geo-routing) = $25/month + your DNS query usage.

Enterprise customers will be able to run 5 second health checks, configure tens of origin servers, and run health checks from every Cloudflare region (13) or datacenter (83 of them, today) for fine-grained failover.

Click to expand...

so my current usage would require Cloudflare Enterprise plan !

I guess my usage wouldn't be possible as non-Enterprise plan user as i have